Europe's October/November spike only ended because the worst affected countries imposed wide-reaching restrictions like curfews - restrictions which far exceeded those in the U.S. If Europe hadnt reacted more rigorously and didnt enjoy a more compliant population, our trajectory would have more or less been the same as in the U.S. That Europe went into cold season with a lower incidence level than the U.S. made no material difference.

It just comes down to the exponential growth: once the spread of the virus gets out of control, the starting level has relatively little impact anymore. Starting from 1000 daily cases instead of 10000 only buys you 2-4 weeks before you're at the point where the healthcare system is facing collapse and hugely painful shutdowns of public life become necessary.

Perhaps you're thinking of this idea that the experts keep pushing and which keeps failing in practice: in theory, lower case numbers make a huge difference because they allow contact tracing to contain the infection clusters and thus prevent uncontrollable spread/expontential growth from taking off. In practice, Europe's contact tracing failed miserably although we had brought our cases down really low. By the way: this same contact tracing strategy is in the process of breaking down as we speak in both South Korea and Japan, countries which were considered the role model for this approach.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 18 2020 01:34pm

I mean the answer is and always has been herd immunity. Pump out vaccines in the next month or so and give them to everyone starting with the high-risk people and let's go on with our life.

I think we should open as soon as possible once some critical mass of high-risk people get the vaccine. By open I mean send kids to school, restaurants, etc.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Dec 18 2020 01:40pm

we haven’t peaked

Not even close

That's not the point. Gradually opening up as more and more people get vaccinated is the obvious path forward in the intermediate future. The bigger and more tricky question is how we approach the short-term issues ahead of us, how we bridge the time until vaccines get us out of the woods. Once spring sets in and flu season ends, the covid situation will ease anyway. And by the start of next winter, we will have vaccinated a sufficient share of the population. But the vaccines wont have an immediate impact on the situation, they wont get us over the remaining winter months. How to best get to spring with the least amount of damage to society (in a holistic sense) is where opinions differ vastly.

To assume that a low daily level of cases does not impact the next wave is a highly presumptuous statement. You can compare the western countries that didn’t go full lockdown with the cases per capita and compare it to the states after the fact. It’s easy to make comparisons now and be like oh see we weren’t that different from
The states,4-6 weeks before our peak

No I’m not talking about contact tracing. That hasn’t been part of the reasonable conversation in the states since April, a dream

All the rhetoric about opening conveniently ignores the status of your healthcare system. U people need to STOP talking about high risk and mortality rates because that is NOT the problem. The problem is hospital saturation / staff saturation

When you are paying traveling nurses 178$/hour and states are competing with each other for them, there is a PROBLEM

This post was edited by Bazi on Dec 18 2020 01:54pm

Well, a lower starting level impacts the next wave in that it delays the time until hospitals are overwhelmed. That's trivial. My point was that a lower starting point yields a surprisingly small TGBL (time gained before lockdown).

Here in the EU, virologists and epidemiologists keep talking about contact tracing and are given a rather large platform for this message - it's just that it already failed miserably at the start of this cold season, back in October.

Given lockdown is not an option the as a whole will go with , it isn’t trivial because that time is very critical. Every week hospital capacities have ability to grow. Inevitably it will not matter because as we have stated it is staff that will be the limiting reagent and there is no solution there

Furthermore that higher plateau will absolutely impact the spikes’s slope and top. This doesn’t hAve to be a guessing game, just wait until February and you can make a very clear analysis amongst the western countries in terms of plateau ->slope/spike and which country’s interventions implemented at what time made what impact on this slope/spike.

The US will be the poster child, will bet anyone any amount of fg our cases/capita and spikes will be tiers above our nearest western counterpart, as a result of our :
1. high summer/fall plateau
2. Resistance for mitigation measures


This post was edited by Bazi on Dec 18 2020 02:07pm

Npr said they will be publishing these weekly

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/944379919/new-data-reveal-which-hospitals-are-dangerously-full-is-yours

I was saying last week how extreme 15% of patients hospitalized for covid are. You are seeing 40% in some areas and this a month before the estimated peek

That post doesnt support your claim.

Notice how I said "even mask mandates" implying that there is more that needs to be done. Mask mandates are the first step and the easiest thing to do. If the states can't even do that consistently then community spread is inevitable, and mass cases like we are seeing now necessitates steos like Lockdowns and school closures.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Dec 18 2020 03:05pm

i bet there are millions of people who wish they could take back their vote and cast it again for the Emperor
they got bamboozled by television and internet posts